tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post8193269926705194678..comments2018-02-21T21:13:32.553-06:00Comments on Adventus: Of bigots and foolsRmjhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06811456254443706479noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-23876059458423388552017-07-12T09:54:51.623-05:002017-07-12T09:54:51.623-05:00Just the other day I had occasion to go back and l...Just the other day I had occasion to go back and look at Alexander Cockburn&#39;s obit of Christopher Hitchens and he said his friends at Verso and New Left Review who adored Hitchens when he published his book slamming Mother Teresa were left wondering &quot;wah happen&quot; when he turned hard neo-con within a few years. Cockburn pointed out that nothing really happened as the same time he was thrilling the religion bashers he was already doing things like saying no one should shed a tear for the millions murdered in the European conquests of the Americas because the &quot;backward&quot; people who lived here were bound to get overrun by their superiors. <br /><br />What Sam Harris shows is that the atheist left is really not much different from the vulgar materialist right. I think that just as freedom can be perverted to mean something evil and destructive, so can secularism (well, religion can too but at least it&#39;s supposed to resist that temptation). I think mixing up the necessary secularism of a non-establishment government of a diverse population with the kind of putrid materialist secularism represented by Harris and Hitchens and, not really much differently, Dawkins and the rest of them has been a really terrible idea.<br /><br />The academic left, the left of the major journalistic voices of the supposed left have played an enormous part in that through their hostility to religion, the ones who take what Jesus, the Prophets and the Law say seriously as well as the hucksters and hypocrites. I don&#39;t much trust them anymore. Considering their role in this last election, from The Nation right down to more obscure magazines and blogs, enabling Trump, I pretty much figure they&#39;ve got to go before things can really improve. The Thought Criminalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01381376556757084468noreply@blogger.com